There is an important difference between domestic economic policies that create benefits by imposing costs on other nations ("beggar-thy-neighbor policies") and those whose economic costs are borne primarily at home though they might affect others as well ("beggar-thyself policies"). Beggar-thy-...

A Turkish court accepted a second indictment yesterday in the infamous Sledgehammer case, adding 28 new names to the 195 officers already under indictment (most of whom have been jailed). The new indictment is based on additional (digital) documents, said to reinforce the original charges, whic...

My colleague Lant Pritchett teaches a course on globalization with Larry Summers, and he invited me to his class recently to debate Summers on free trade. I used a few thought experiments to get students to understand how thinking about trade policy requires going beyond economics to considering...

(This is the Afterword that appears in my book The Globalization Paradox. It is an attempt to state the book's central argument in the form of a bedtime story.) Once upon a time there was a little fishing village at the edge of a lake. The villagers were poor, living off the fish they caught an...

I am copying here Martin Wolf's comments on the Doha Round, as expressed on the CUTS-tradeforum. I find them remarkable because Martin simultaneously explodes three myths about the trade regime. First, he dismisses the "bicycle theory" of trade negotiations, which says that the trade regime will...

I thought it would be useful to clarify the economic theory that lies behind my parable on the global economy. The book covers these issues at length, so I thought that the links with the parable, coming at the end as it does, would be obvious to the reader. Obviously this need not be the case...

I have a new paper out by this title, which you can download here. It shows that unconditional convergence is alive and well, but that we need to look for it within manufacturing industries rather than the economy as a whole. Industries that start at lower levels of labor productivity grow faste...

Many moons ago, I wrote a paper (with Alberto Alesina) called “Distributive Politics and Economic Growth,” which remains one of my most heavily cited publications. The paper has a simple idea: in highly unequal societies, the median voter is more likely to demand high taxes on capital, which in...

By Derek Headey, guest blogger Have higher food prices hurt the poor, or helped them? So far everything we "know" about this topic comes from simulation studies, all of which estimate that poverty or hunger went up by somewhere between 63-160 million people as a result of higher food prices ...

[Note: This piece first appeared in Paul Krugman's blog.] In what is probably the country’s most important court case in at least five decades, hundreds of Turkish military officers are in jail and on trial for allegedly having plotted to overthrow the then newly-elected Justice and Development ...

This has been a long-standing concern of mine: what are the respective roles of ideas iand interests in shaping policy outcomes? The most widely held theory of politics is also the simplest: the powerful get what they want. Financial regulation is driven by the interests of banks, health policy ...

Imagine you are the leader of a regional power, basking in the glow of global attention to your political and economic success. You have managed to consolidate your power by outmaneuvering your opponents, most critically the military with its habit of pushing out governments not of its liking. ...

To understand what is happening in Turkey’s murky world of judicial politics these days, it helps to imagine you are watching the closing scenes of a Hollywood courtroom drama. The movie’s protagonist stands accused of attempted murder. The prosecutor has produced a set of elaborate plans that t...

Yes if you are an individual, but probably not if you are an entire country. As the figure below shows, there are very few countries that have developed beyond $5,000 in 2005 PPP dollars without becoming democracies somewhere along the way (unless they are an oil economy). This scatter plot co...

Look at the chart below, and you will go a good way towards understanding why the problem with Greece has been allowed to get worse and worse (the proverbial “kicking the can down the road”) to the point where it may have become too late. The chart shows the IMF’s growth projections for Greece...

Guest Post by Danny Leipziger,Professor of International Business at George Washington University, and former Vice President for Poverty Reduction and Economic Management at the World Bank A new president will take over the World Bank on July 1st. Dr. Jim Kim inherits a venerable institution tha...

The European Union, and the Eurozone in particular, has impressive institutional achievements to its name. We have a European Parliament, European Commission, European Court of Justice, a set of common regulations that exceeded 100,000 last time I checked (acquis communautaire), and of course t...

I have blogged before about a rather surprising result (to me at least) regarding productivity convergence in manufacturing. Despite the lack of convergence among economies as a whole, there is apparently quite strong convergence within manufacturing industries. What this means is that manufac...

For a lot of questions, comparisons of per-capita GDP yield the correct answer to a first-order of approximation. For example, are Americans richer than the Chinese? A comparison of GDPs per capita, adjusted for PPP differences, yields an unambiguous answer in favor of the U.S. Yes, income may...

The Turkish court that sentenced more than 300 officers on coup plotting charges in September apparently thinks so. The Turkish military has long set the ground rules for Turkish politics, and this was hailed as a landmark trial. Many saw it as the centerpiece of a democratic, mildly Islamist gov...